Student-Teachers’ Interest in the Teaching Profession and the Future of Teaching as a Profession in Nigeria. A Study of Faculty of Education Students, Niger Delta Unversity, Bayelsa State, Nigeria

Abstract

The teaching profession in Nigeria appears to suffer a lot of neglect compared to most other callings. Ironically, it is the teacher that trained all the professionals including the political class that tends to underrate teachers. Most young people seeking admissions would ordinarily consider this noble profession as their last option of study due to the perceived neglect of those already in the teaching system. In view of the above perception, this study was carried out at the Faculty of Education, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State, Nigeria to ascertain the extent of keen interest and zeal student-teachers would appreciate becoming teachers upon graduation from the university. The study adopted a simple random sampling technique to select 50 students each from the 6 (six) Departments within the Faculty to respond to the 12 items in the instrument developed by the researchers for the study. The instrument was presented to experts in Measurement and evaluation in the Department of Educational Foundations and considered satisfied before they were administered to the randomly selected respondents. In all, 300 respondents among the 300 Level students served as respondents. Two research questions and one null hypothesis were posed and tested to guide the study. Frequency counts, percentages and mean scores of each item collated from the data and analysed were used to arrive at results for the two research questions, while Independent t-test statistics were applied to analyse for results with respect to the hypothesis. The results from the research questions indicated that the majority of the student-teachers were not interested in the teaching profession and would ordinarily opt out for other careers if they are opportuned to do so. However, the result of the hypothesis tested accepted the null hypothesis, indicating that there is no meaningful difference between student-teachers who will be interested in teaching as their future profession upon completion of their course of study and those who may not want to be teachers upon graduation. The study concluded among others that the issues of teacher welfare in terms of regular/prompt payment of salaries and boosting of their morale through motivational incentives and regular training in addition to considering the aptitude of the student’s interest in becoming future teachers should be taken into consideration before they are admitted into the Faculties of Education pursue a course in education. This, no doubt, will check the attrition rate of teacher education graduates and save the future of the teaching profession.